Whenever we travel, Tomas prays for divine appointments. Tomas Santiago is a long-time friend of mine, going back to college. He is also a prayer warrior and one of our personal intercessors.

Tomas prays for divine appointments and they happen to us often, so often that I may tend to take them for granted.

So, what is a divine appointment, you ask? A divine appointment is a meeting that God has arranged. It was not planned. It was not locked into a time or place on the calendar. It just happened . . . except that it didn’t just happen. God put it together!

On our last trip to Minneapolis, we had a divine appointment. For five days, we arranged and set meetings on our calendar. Then on the way home, we had one other couple to see . . . the Hennings in the Alexandria area.

Steve Henning and I also go back a long way. When I was starting out in media productions in the Minneapolis area, having just finished college, I answered an ad in the paper. I don’t remember what it said, exactly. They just needed someone creative to brainstorm, or something like that. When I went to the location, an advertising agency in a house in Minneapolis, I met Steve Henning. For several years after that, I produced projects for Steve, mainly video and music productions.

Then he moved out of Minneapolis to the Alexandria area and I lost track of him for about ten years. One day, out of the blue, I received an email from Steve Henning. He had found me on the web and wanted to know if I was the same George Halama. Well, there was a pretty good chance of that, since there are only eight George Halamas in the nation.

By this time, I had been in ministry for several years. Steve and his wife, Jackie were also Christians, so we reconnected and after that, got together quite often.

Well, before we started this trip, Steve said to give them a call when we got into the area. So on the way back, I mentioned to Lorraine that we needed to call Steve and stop to visit. She said to call, and I said I would wait until we were closer to his house. This is because if I call too early and estimate a time we will arrive, that timeline might get messed up if we by chance stumble upon a really cool thrift shop, or something like that.

So about an hour and a half from Steve and Jackie’s house, I gave Steve a call on his cell phone.

“Hello.”

“Steve, this is George. You said to give you a call when we are going through.”

“Oh, hi George. Are you on your way back from Minneapolis?”

“Yep.”

“Well, I’m just coming back from a video shoot, so I’m not at home.”

I was vaguely familiar with the location he gave me and I thought it was not too far from us. “We’re about an hour from Alexandria on I-94,” I said.

“Oh really? What town are you by?”

“We just past the Freeport exit.”

“Oh, for crying out loud. I’m just behind you on the freeway . . . about seven or eight miles.”

Well, that was pretty cool. “Steve’s just behind us on the freeway,” I said to Lorraine.

“Well, you want to pull off and get something to eat?” Steve asked.

And so it went. About 15 minutes later, we were all sitting in a restaurant together. Steve wanted to know the skinny on our trip to Minneapolis. We, of course, wanted to know what he was doing. Steve and Jackie own a media productions company.

Later in the conversation, Steve paused and shook his head in unbelief, that when I called him we were just a few miles apart on the freeway. A bit later, he again paused and remarked how amazing that was.

This is called a divine appointment. It is not a coincidence. If this kind of thing happened once, you would say it was a coincidence. But it happens to us every few days, and Tomas prays almost every day for divine appointments for us. So they are just that, God arranged divine appointments. Divine appointments are so much better than the traditional scheduling of meetings, because you don’t have to put any work into them. God does it all!

I almost forgot, but there was another encounter on that trip that I think was a divine appointment. About four months ago, Lorraine and I went to my high school reunion in Kelliher, Minnesota. One of my classmates, who lives in Minneapolis, was there. His name is Ed.

Earlier in the week of the trip to Minneapolis, Lorraine and I were at a large grocery store just off of highway 610 on the north side of Minneapolis. We had just met a board member for lunch, and afterward Lorraine wanted to pic up some groceries. I was just standing near the checkout reading a newspaper, when someone said, “Hey, how are you doin’?”

Startled, I looked up and it was Ed. Before the class reunion, I hadn’t seen Ed in about ten years. This was the second time in four months.

We began talking and then his wife came up, whom I had never met. Then Lorraine came along and the two wives began talking. In a short wile, Ed’s wife asked that we give them a call the next time we come down so we can get together.

Well, you know Minneapolis is a big city, and I didn’t know where Ed and his wife lived. But there he comes, right to the the store where we were and we ran into each other. Not a coincidence . . . a divine appointment.

There are three things to take away from this story: God answers prayer; Tomas prays all of the time for divine appointments for us. The second thing is that I think God gets a real charge out of arranging these things for us. The third thing is that we must always be aware and discerning. What is God doing in all of this? What does He want us to?